Benefits of Parenting: Kids smell good

I have several friends and colleagues who don’t have kids, and I often wonder if The Poop has become a pretty effective birth control. When parents here get in a discussion about what we’ve given up because of parenthood, the worst tantrum or the last time we’ve seen a movie in a theater (“Point Break”!), it should go without saying that it’s all worth it. But that part doesn’t always come across.

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Kids smell good.

So I thought I’d start the week by focusing on some good news for scared potential parents. Go ahead and throw away the condoms again! Whatever you think of the odorous qualities of other people’s children right now, yours are going to smell great.

Having bad smelling kids was something that I was worried about long before my wife and I decided to have children. I had heard horror stories about what our cars would smell like (if our vehicles smell any different with a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, I haven’t noticed), and I was concerned about having a brood that would constantly make me gag. I’m one of those people who has to avoid entire sections of the Farmer’s Market because of the assault on my nasal passages — would I be capable of parenting at all?

While it’s true that changing diapers isn’t like skipping through a field of jasmine, I barely notice that any more. And 90 percent of the rest of the time, my kids smell fantastic. I often wonder if passersby in the grocery store or at the park think it’s weird that I’m constantly smelling my kids’ heads, as if looking for another fix.

I’m now convinced that my children will always smell good. I’m even looking forward to that bad 14-year-old phase where they start experimenting with cologne.

Below are the three best kid smell phases I’ve experienced so far. Your contributions in the comments …

Age: 0-5 months.

The Smell: Baby head.

We’ve already covered this ground before, but a newborn baby’s head is pretty much the best smell ever. I can’t do it justice without describing it (“fertile” and “sunshine-y” are the words that keeps coming to my head) so I’ll let readers discover for themselves. I think if people just smelled a baby’s head before making rash decisions, we would have fewer violent crimes, fewer wars and a lot fewer bad haircuts.

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Insert your own peeing-in-Cheerios joke here …

Age: 10 months to 2 years.

The Smell Combination: Cheerios and pee.

This will sound insane to non-parents, but I was looking forward to my second child’s Cheerios-and-pee phase even more than baby’s head. Dog pee and adult pee may be awful, but the faint scent of toddler pee can actually be kind of pleasant. I especially like how first thing in the morning my just-turned 1-year-old grins like a madman, completely oblivious to the fact that he smells like pee. (I wish I had that kind of self-confidence at 38.) My older son had a lot of diaper rash as a toddler, so he often had this third smell, which is in the same family as Ben-Gay on the odor spectrum but much nicer.

We’re blessed with a 4-year-old who loves to take baths, so he rarely smells horrible. I know this sounds like something Hannibal Lector would do, but I often go into his room after he’s asleep and smell his head and neck for 30 or 40 seconds. Mostly he smells like some combinations of the above five scents, sometimes with a little cedar thrown in (if he’s playing in a specific park), maple syrup or a little sausage. One unexplainable fact: My son often smells like suntan lotion even when he hasn’t applied any in several months. Weird.